Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB Gen 5 SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.

In CrystalDiskMark 8's 4K QD1 T1 test, the Seagate FireCuda 540's read result sees the drive sitting in fifth place behind the two Crucial T700 drives and the two fastest Gen 4 drives we've seen to date in this test, Lexar's Professional NM800 PRO and WD's Black SN850X. However, the FireCuda 540 has the second fastest write performance we've seen to date.

As you can see from the benchmark result screens we can confirm the official Sequential read/write figures of 10,000MB/s with test result figures of 10,076MB/s for reads and 10,194MB/s for writes.

Those Sequential scores see the drive sitting in fourth place in the results chart. It also shows just how much faster the Sequential performance of a Gen 5 drive is over the previous Gen 4 ones as the FireCuda 540 is some 2,700MB/s faster for reads and 3,127MB/s faster for writes than the previous generation flagship drive, the FireCuda 530.

Peak Performance Profile

Using the Peak Performance profile of the CrystalDiskMark benchmark we could confirm the official 4K random read/write figures for the drive of up to 1,490,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,500,000 IOPS for writes with test results of 1,493,269 IOPS for reads and 1,675,256 IOPS for writes.

With the Peak Performance profile could once again confirm the official Sequential performance figures with the drive slipping into third place behind the two Crucial drives. The Crucial T700 drives have the advantage as they have their NAND flash memory clocked at 2,000MT/s whereas the FireCuda 540 NAND runs at 1,600MT/s.

Real World Profile

Seagate's FireCuda 540 sits in third place in the Real World Profile chart with Sequential read/write scores of 8.722MB/s and 9,887MB/s respectively, a fair way off both versions of Crucial's T700 that lead the way.

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